One of the hardest lessons I have had to learn is that facts are not all powerful. As a scientist, I love facts. A paleontologist tells me that there is a 365-million-year-old fishlike thing with eight fingers that is an ancient cousin to tetrapods? Amazing! Where can we find more like it?

It can be tempting to oversimplify the problem of science denial and to vilify the groups we feel are responsible, but as a new report on Perceptions of Science in America from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences reminds us, this stuff is complicated.

Every teacher knows that students take more interest in lessons that relate to things they care about. Well, it’s safe to say that, right now, students in Florida, Texas, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, care deeply about hurricanes. And students in California care profoundly about wildfires. That means that teachers—as they carry out their vital and underappreciated work giving students a sense of normalcy—have an opportunity to turn their students’ very real and recent experiences into learning opportunities. At NCSE, we’re hoping to gather anecdotal evidence that teachers are using recent events as a bridge to exploring how scientists evaluate the contributions of climate change to extreme weather and weather-related events. We hope to discover that teachers are finding ways to enhance how they cover climate change in their classrooms—once they can finally get back into them.

Consider, if you will, Bret Stephens’s inaugural column in The New York Times, published on April 28, 2017, under the title “Climate of Complete Certainty.” Owing to Stephens’s past misrepresentations of climate change, the column received a lot of scrutiny—provoking “an unusually large outpouring” of letters to the editor, including one from Merchants of Doubt coauthor Naomi Oreskes, as well as incisive criticism from